Multi-rate segmented time-interleaved current steering DAC with unity-elements sharing

A novel multi-rate Time-Interleaved Current Steering Digital to Analog Converter with unity element sharing is presented. Proposed 12-bit DAC is simulated in 90nm CMOS technology. The implemented DAC is divided to two segments, MSB and LSB segments, each having 6 bits of resolution. Taking advantage of the oversampling requirement due to the reconstruction filter at the DAC output, the MSB segment is further separated to 6 subDACs to implement time-interleaved and return-to-zero techniques. Time interleaved technique reduces the switching speed of each individual unit element to 1/6^th of the sampling clock frequency and RTZ technique improves the linearity of the DAC. Simulations show that employed technique improves the linearity over 6dB with an SFDR of 85dB with 6GS/s sampling frequency and 460MHz input frequency. The DAC draws 13mA from a 1.5V supply. The expected active area of the DAC is 1mm².